Diem begged for US Marines to crush 1960 Saigon coup
By Desmond Okafor ·
President Ngô Đình Diệm pleaded for American boots on the ground to hold an airport while his own generals were held captive in the Presidential Palace.
Two generals sat as captives in the Presidential Palace while a paratrooper colonel decided the fate of a government. The cost of this hesitation was a fragile stability that Ngô Đình Diệm tried to salvage with a desperate plea for foreign bayonets.
In a telegram dated November 11, 1960, Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow reported to the Department of State that the situation in Saigon remained "fluid." The document describes a capital city in the grip of a military uprising, where the lines of authority had collapsed into a series of high-stakes negotiations between a besieged president and the men who had just imprisoned his top commanders.
Presumably Captives
By 12:40 p.m. that day, the reports reaching the embassy indicated that General Ty and General Hoang, the Commander of the Capital Military Region, were "presumably captives" of Colonel Nguyễn Chánh Thi. Thi, a paratrooper commander and the apparent leader of the coup, had brought the generals to the palace to negotiate directly with President Diệm.
According to the public record, the coup was a joint effort between Thi and Lieutenant Colonel Vương Văn Đông, though Durbrow's dispatch focuses on Thi as the primary interlocutor. The rebels were not operating in a vacuum of ideology; they used Radio Saigon to broadcast an "anti-Communist stand," claiming a desire to "unify South Viet-Nam against Communists."
There was a jagged contradiction at the heart of the uprising. The military revolutionary committee broadcasted that the "army rose to overthrow Diem government," yet the record suggests they did not necessarily want to "eliminate Diem completely." They wanted a different kind of state, or perhaps just a different set of advisors, and they were willing to hold the nation's highest military officers hostage to secure that shift.
A Belgian Priest
While Colonel Thi negotiated from a position of strength, President Diệm reached out through an unlikely conduit: Father De Jaegher, a Belgian priest who served as an unofficial bridge between the palace and the local Chinese community.
Through De Jaegher, Diệm issued a request that would have fundamentally altered the American footprint in Vietnam. He asked for "US Marines land to protect American lives and hold Saigon airport."
It was a request for immediate intervention. The airport was already "apparently in the hands of rebels," and Diệm was effectively asking the United States to seize a strategic hub from his own army to ensure his own survival. The record shows that Ambassador Durbrow saw through the panic. He noted that such an action was "obviously not called for now" and pledged to make this clear to the president.
This refusal reveals the calculating distance the United States maintained during the crisis. The embassy was not interested in saving Diệm from the consequences of his own governance; they were interested in the outcome of the gamble. Durbrow was seeking "clarification" of the committee's objectives, weighing whether Diệm could "reasonably accept" the rebels' demands to permit a form of "collaboration."
"Elimination [of] Nhus"
The price of that collaboration was specific and surgical. The rebels were not just targeting the presidency; they were targeting the family. Durbrow notes that a compromise might involve "major changes such as elimination Nhus, etc."
Ngô Đình Nhu and his wife, Madame Nhu, were the architects of Diệm's internal security apparatus and the primary targets of both the rebel officers and the growing resentment of the Vietnamese public. The US government's appetite for their removal was evident in Durbrow's willingness to entertain the possibility, provided it stabilized the regime.
Yet, the American officials were careful to keep their hands clean. Durbrow explicitly states that neither he, nor General McGarr, nor any other "senior American officials will act as mediators." Instead, the dirty work of brokering a deal between a captive government and a revolutionary committee was to be "carried out through lower officers."
It was a strategy of plausible deniability—letting the junior ranks handle the treason and the compromise while the embassy watched from the sidelines, deciding which version of a South Vietnamese government was most palatable to Washington. While other files on this era, such as the FRUS "List of Persons (1958–1960)" or various Department of Defense memoranda, likely track the movements of these actors, Durbrow's telegram captures the precise moment of the pivot.
The telegram, marked "Secret," was repeated for information to Manila for Felt and CINCPAC PolAd and passed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It leaves open the question of how the "lower officers" handled the negotiations that ultimately failed to remove Diệm, but succeeded in deepening the instability of the regime.